Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

between 1945 and 1947 hundreds of presbyters and preachers in the Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldavia, Siberia and elsewhere were sent to prison. The AUCECB has not challenged these claims. 7. Mitrokhin, Baptizm, p. ‘77. 8. BV, 1/60, p. 87. 9. Lialina, p. 40. The Voronezh split was the subject of a major sociological study reported in N. S. Zlobina, “Sovremennyi baptizm i ego ideologiia,” Voprosy istorii religti i ateizma, Vol. IX, 1963, pp. 95-125. 10. BV, 6/63, pp. 34 and 39, 11. Biographical data on Prokofiev and other Initsiativniki is based on card files at Keston College and my own card file. 12. On Kriuchkov see AS 1089 (Bulletin No. 8, 1971), pp. 7-9. For more biographical details see Chap. 8 below. 13. In his autobiography published posthumously, Sergei T. Golev described how upon his release from prison and exile in 1958 Ilia G. Ivanov had invited him to work for the AUCECB. But after discovering that this would involve reporting to the state authorities, he refused. Later he led an unregistered gdp in Riazan which joined the reformers in 1961 after they received the first copies of Samizdat (Jakob Esau, Sergi T. Golev & Johann Steffen, Unter dem Schirm des Hichsten [Wup- pertal: R. Brockhaus Verlag, 1979], pp. 121-143). S. Kh. Tsurkan was described by Ivanov when visiting him in 1947 as an experienced, leading worker in Moldavia, but subsequently Tsurkan was no longer mentioned in the pages of Bratskii Vestnik. 14. Letter quoted from Mitrokhin & Klibanov, p. 86. 15. BV, 1/48, p. 6; 5/48, p. 4; 1/49, p. 5; 2/55, p. 69; 1/59, p. 62. 16. BV, 1/49, p. 21. 17. Umsiedler interview data. 18. A copy of the 1948 statute has not become available nor is the reaction of the congregations at that time known. Senior presbyters regularly reported that on their visits to congregations they enforced the statute, implying that resistance had been encountered. 19. _B. A. Rusanov was one of those excommunicated by the Reformers (AS 770); he became the senior presbyter for the Caucasus and served till 1964, On I. Ia. Tatarchenko (1899-1972) see below, p. 210. 20. AS 770, p. 6. 21. A handy list of the appeals, chronologically arranged, appears as appendix f . ae f a \ 196 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il to Michael Bourdeaux & Albert Boiter, “Baptists in the Soviet Union 1960-71,” Radio Liberty Research Bulletin, January 31, 1972, 22. At the 1966 and 1969 congresses they spoke about a “mistake,” More ex- plicit admissions were made in private talks with foreign churchmen. 23. BV, 2/54, pp, 38-41; 6/63, p. 42, 24. Kommunisticheskaia partiia i sovetskoe pravitel’stvo o religit i tserkvi (Moscow, 1959). 25. Luchterhandt, Der Sowjet Staat, pp. 125-26. The existence of the 1961 le- gally binding instruction became known ee h a reference to it at trials in 1966. This was confirmed in igor Shafarevich’s ieeal study (1971 Samizdat) but the full text as printed in Kuroedov & P